Winner Take All

ABBA sings a song, "The Winner Takes It All." The lyrics are HERE. Because I don't want to post them up on my blog cause they're long. It's my new favourite song. It's meaningful to me. At this point in life anyways. I'm tired. Maybe it's just that I've had to step outside myself into something new lately. Or maybe it's just because today was a long day and I tend to get emotional after such days. Either way, I feel tired. Of everything.

Not in and of itself. I'm just sick and tired building dream castles. Tired of pinning my hopes on things that just shatter at the first sign of stress. It's all well and good to plan for the future, it's nice to dream of things to come. And it even feels good. It makes things seem so near, so simple, and so easy and comfortable. But then, the trouble with building cloud castles is that you can't live in them. You have to come back down to earth eventually, and then what good do your castles made of clouds do you? None at all.

I'm an idealist. I like to believe in the things that most people these days accept as not existing. The good in every person, the beauty in every person, that things always work out well in the end. In today's world, being an idealist takes a lot of effort, because the world and everything in it seem hellbent on breaking each and every dream of yours into the smallest pieces possible. I'm proud that I could make it this far as an idealist, but I wonder if it's time to grow out of the wide-eyed, hopeful, little boy routine.

But therein lies the conflict. I know people who thought just that. Who stopped hoping, or trusting, or believing. And they let themselves get hard. And I don't want to be that way, because that can't be what we were made to be, can it? I mean, if we were made to be hard, and unfeeling, then we'd have been made out of rock. I believe with every ounce of faith I have, that the world is messed up. This isn't the way things were meant to be, and I would do anything, give anything, become anything to fix it. Because the world we know now, isn't a world I want to live in. I hate it.

It's a society where people honor morally unsound public figures because they're rich. It's a world where people tear at each other, claw their way over others, uncaring of what they have to do or become to get to the "top." It wears away at you, the sheer enormity of the oppression that has become this life, like a sea wearing at a cliff. Pounding endlessly until you just break, and great big parts of you fall away and you lose them forever.

I think that lately, faced with a crossroads of some kind, I've been trying to hold on to all the parts of me that make me...well me, really. It's like suddenly, I'm seventeen years old. And now is when I have to decide what kind of person I'll be, what kind of life I'll lead, what kind of people I'll know and influence and be influenced by. And honestly, sometimes it feels like it's too much for one soul to bear. Sometimes I just don't want to be alive, I'd rather never have existed than have to have come to this point. It's as if, after all my life living on the ground, I've been thrown out of a plane and told to fly or die.

There's so much I want to do and be and see and feel and have and know, but I don't know the first thing when it comes to going after them. It makes you feel stupid, and helpless, not knowing how to run your own life. And then, the pressure doesn't seem to come from outside anymore, but from inside you. You become your own harshest critic, and it becomes so easy to start hating yourself for your blind, blissful, ignorance. What can you do, when you detest the way you are?

I think that the way Christianity has become an excuse for bigotry and discrimination doesn't help matters much either. I mean young people today, not just me, a whole great big bunch of us all feel just as lost and helpless as I do. And when we should be able to be near God, be guided to him, we get put in boxes, shackled down by the added laws and regulation of Christians who forgot what it's like to be this way. I wonder what things will come to if people stay this way. It'll be a free-for-all. All the basest instincts of humanity will emerge until we're no better than animals. I don't want to be around when that happens. I really don't.

Disillusioned

In the dark I sit and stare,
At words upon a page,
Words that detail all my hope,
And all my pain and rage,

In the dark I sit and think,
As time ceases to move,
About things that I wish to see,
Things to gain and prove,

In the dark I move away,
From all that light and hope have shown,
The things the world will never be,
Dead leaves by cold winds blown,

In the dark I lay me down,
To sleep in the dead of night,
To rest at last my weary soul,
To clean away the blight,

In the dark I hide away,
Curled into a little ball,
Because the world is cold and grey,
And the winners take it all

Bleh. Emo poem. I haven't written one in awhile. But I like this one. The ending is ambiguous enough. Well, I'm tired. So I'm going to sleep.

Adieu,

Jared